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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

Those were the gpus of the day. At some point, everything got integrated into the cpu. Will we see a similar reintegration any soon?

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A whole range of CPUs have integrated GPUs, but nothing on the high end.

I think there are technical limitations re. die size and heat dissipation if we wanted to integrate a high end CPU and a high end GPU in the same package.

Precisely this. Most modern CPUs would be better called SoCs, with CPU/GPU/XPU cores all on a single package. If you want any sort of stopping power in terms of the number of cores or the clocking speed of said cores, you need massive amounts of cooling, hence why GPUs are sold as bulky PCIe cards.

I think the Apple chips are the highest end integrated CPU/GPU chips? Especially on the mobile site, and if measured in terms of price.

They are far from the best performers, of course. They are meant to run on low-ish power, especially compared to a desktop or server chip.

the top spec RyzenG Chip is no slouch.

Possible... The recent Intel Xeon Max with the "brand-new" AMX instructions and 64GB on-chip HBM memory could be an example[0]...

[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...

I've often thought Intel kind of ignored the discrete GPU market for so long because they just assumed they would eventually absorb those functions into the CPU like they did with everything else.

Current CPU vector instruction sets are as good as the ones on GPUs and they also have tensor/matrix instructions comparable to the ones on GPUs.

However, usually CPUs don't have enough cores and execution units to compete with GPUs, because they spend the transistors on out-of-order execution, cache and other features instead.

Intel Larrabee was the only attempt to actually make a CPU with a GPU-sized vector unit and they dropped it.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html

Is the Apple Mx series about that?

Yep. GPU is built into the same die as the CPU. Not the same package, the same die.

You can see a (small) annotated die shot of the M1 here:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-vs-apple-m14-floo...

Wow. This is interesting. It used to be everything had to be on die... then on package... and with recent architectures, multiple dies, multiple processes... things are again exploding.

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1-vs-m2-chip/

we are on the another iteration: wifi cards are integreted now

You read the article which is cool, but Wifi was on chip set during the Centrino days, then WinModems ( blows chunks ), and now we have Wifi/BT/Audio/Kitchen sink on chip.

And you didn't read the comment I was responding to.

> Wifi was on chip set during the Centrino days

Except it did not:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Wireless-MiniPCI-Adapter-WM3B21...

> WinModems

Which were just firmware moved to software

> Wifi/BT/Audio/Kitchen sink on chip

Yes, but no: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

>> The AC 9560 and 9460 family of wireless (Wi-Fi + Bluetooth) modules are the first generation of CNVi modules.[3] They are only compatible with systems running Intel Gen. 8 or 9 processor on adapted motherboards.

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